The opening poem of Lucie Brock-Broido’s, The Master Letters, “Carrowmore,” sets the tone for the collection’s baroque and elliptical style. In the poem, named for a “megalithic cemetery outside Sligo, Ireland,” (1997, 78) both landscape and history encroach on the lyric I, which does not appear until the sixth stanza. Brock-Broido offers the following description of the historical site:
“Many of the neglected monuments, some dating back to 4000 BC, have been partially destroyed, but three well-preserved dolmens & a rough stone circle still remain. The cremated remains of the land’s original inhabitants are buried there, marked by the circumference of the stones” (1997, 78).
The ancient burial ground is characterized by both neglect and preservation. This is a duality also present in many Brock-Broido poems, described by critic Stephanie Burt as the speaker’s “conflicting impulse” to be simultaneously “powerful, visible” while also being “invisible…to dissolve into the identity of another” (2002, 105-106). Much like the three dolmens and rough stone circle of the burial site, the lyric I appears in the latter half of “Carrowmore” subdivided and incoherent, preserved in a fragmented form.
Another defining feature of Brock-Broido’s poems are frequent references to hunger, which both Burt and the late critic Helen Vendler also registered. I read the speaker’s subdivided and incoherent self as an enactment of the anorexic’s logic. In an eating disorder’s pathology, fragmentation of self occurs vis-a-vis damage to the physical body, whether that be starvation, binge/purge cycles, food restriction, or a bodily fixation. Such obsessions and rituals obscure the individual’s capacity to see themself as a whole, instead presenting the body/self as a series of imperfections requiring correction. Brock-Broido’s speakers are subdivided and recaptured in the consciousness of various animals, such as the lambs of “Carrowmore”:
All about Carrowmore the lambs
Were blotched blue, belonging.
They were waiting for carnage or
Snuff. This is why they are born
To begin with, to end.
Ruminants do not frighten
At anything—gorge in the soil, butcher
Noise, the mere graze of predators.
The speaker’s desire to belong tinges the opening lines. She wishes for the oblivion of ruminant consciousness because it offers freedom from self-awareness: the lamb cannot know that death is coming for him. The lambs represent belonging, purposefulness, even if that belonging is to a fate of “carnage” or “snuff.” The speaker seems lacks this sense of purpose; she implicitly understands that, as a human, she was not “born…//…to end” in the way livestock is but rather is bound to a life suffused with the existential dread brought on by self-consciousness.
The speaker’s frayed self-consciousness is perhaps what propels her to Carrowmore in the first place: to come to a place of unambiguous “end,” a burial ground of the ancient, long-dead past:
All about Carrowmore
The rain quells for three days.
I remember how cold I was, the botched
Job of travelling. And just so.
The collapse of boundaries between past and present is another hallmark of Brock-Broido’s poetry. Alongside this is the first appearance of the “I.” Though the perspective changes, this set of couplets echoes the poem’s first two: with the refrain, the blotched blue lambs transformed into “the botched / Job of traveling,” the wooly coats refigured as a shaft in the ground, the mark of a grave. The linguistic echoes serve as a kind of disfigurement to the poem’s opening couplets; notably, the remembering “I” accompanies this disfigurement. The disfiguring impact also conveys the fraught state of remembering, how memory is inevitably partial and incomplete. In both readings, the entry of the speaker’s self is what disrupts perfection, botches things.
Wherever I went I came with me.
She buried her bone barrette
In the ground’s wooly shaft.
A tear of her hair, an old gift
To the burnt other who went
First. My thick braid, my ornament—
My belonging I
Remember how cold I will be.
Dismay at the self and a desire to escape tinges the line “wherever I went I came with me”; Yet the desire to escape the self merely subdivides that self. The POV shift from I to she in couplet seven captures this split. The split is intensified by the list of highly feminized images which Whewell highlights: bone barrette, tear of hair, thick braid. Embedded within the images—what Burt describes as Brock-Broido’s “ample prop closet” (2016, 95)—is an implication of violence comparable with the eventual destruction of the lambs. The manufacture of bone barrettes requires the death of an animal. A tear of hair might be a chunk of hair ripped violently from the scalp, but its homonym also suggests a tear droplet, an expression of grief. The thick braid seems a likely allusion to Rapunzel, a girl imprisoned in a tower by a sorceress due to her mother’s thieving from the sorceress’ garden. The images all speak to the self-inflicted violence embedded in an eating disorder, the prop scale violence paralleling that of the subdivided self.
As mentioned before, a hallmark of eating-disorder pathology is evaluating the body/self in terms of its constituent parts. The offering of a part—the “tear of hair” for instance—is especially evocative. In its division from the whole, the body is imbued with beauty and mysticism: the “thick braid” an “ornament,” perhaps the only acceptable part of the speaker’s body. Ornamenting also speaks to another tendency of individuals with eating disorders—to highlight one aspect of the individual’s appearance—whether that be with distinctive makeup or hyper-stylized clothing, as a way to distract from “flawed parts.” Hair seems to be the favored “part” in Brock-Broido’s poems, like Rome Beauty. She discusses hair’s near mythological importance to her in a Guernica interview: “[in childhood] all my hair was shorn off in a barber shop in Atlantic City. I swore, ‘as god as my witness’ that no one would ever again cut my hair, not against my will.” The critic Esther Whewell also notes the ubiquity of hair in Brock-Broido’s work, observing it has “[a] strange relationship with material vitality, somewhere on the way to death and still attached to life” (2021, 163). In the poem’s final couplet, the line break—“I / Remember how cold I will be”—speaks to this convergent space.
The subdivision of the speakers’ selves recurs throughout The Master Letters. Burt describes the “Brock-Broido’s transits among selves…[as] a series of attempts to find a voice the Master might hear, a voice to which he might respond” (2002, 112). In addition to Burt’s observation of the speaker’s psyche, it is also notable that she refers directly to Brock-Broido, rather than a speaker, dissolving the sacred boundary between speaker and author.
Burt’s observation of transiting selves bears out in the tellingly titled poem “Moving On in the Dark Like Loaded Boats at Night, Though There Is No Course, There is Boundlessness.” The title is excerpted from Dickinson’s letter to her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, a woman with whom Dickinson had an intense intimacy (Popova, 2018):
Hopelessness in its / first Film has not / leave to last / That would / close the Spirit, / and
no / intercession could / do that — / Intimacy with / Mystery, after great / Space, will
usurp / it’s place — / Moving on in / the Dark like / Loaded Boats / at Night, though there
is no course, there is / boundlessness —[from Dickinson Electronic Archives]
Over time despair of the unknown transforms to an intimacy with it. To move from despair to intimacy does not necessarily indicate acceptance of the unknown but rather adjustment to a new normal. In her poem, Brock-Broido portrays this adjustment as the oscillation of grief:
Master, then This—I crossed my father’s gate.
Once, I walked into the northern lake
Dazzled by the lubricious feel of old botched
Leaves. When he died, he went on like a loaded
Trout stream—toward a Body larger than this one
Is, wading hip-high in the loaded
Dark of boneless water, moving On.
In an endnote, Brock-Broido explains that the opening line here is a play on a line from another Dickinson letter, sent to Thomas Higginson, in which she declines his invitation to travel to Boston and instead encourages him to visit her in Amherst. The first end-stopped line conveys a finality akin to Dickinson’s refusal. The heavily enjambed and subordinated second sentence and Dickinson’s subsequent invitation to Higginson immediately supplant the finality of the earlier sentiments. The contrast between the end-stopped and subordinated lines reflects the turbulence of grief: you feel everything and so you must stop the world to feel nothing only moments later to be “dazzled” by everything.
After Pennsylvania, I couldn’t breathe.
Why would what died once keep on dying off
Over & over like a seam in an old velvet coat?
Every night I am the same brilliant fluke
Rising from my bed like a cut-
Throat trout listening for Trick, not
Moving, bound—
Brock-Broido grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, along the confluence of three rivers: the Monongahela, the Allegheny, and the Ohio. Helped along by images of fish and boats, it is hard not to read “Pennsylvania” as a metonym for these three rivers. In the end-stopped line, the speaker embodies a fish caught in the waters, no longer able to “breathe” because it has been taken from its habitat.
Later in this section, the speaker makes explicit and then immediately puns on her the self- identification with fish. “Fluke” is a type of fish, a stroke of luck, and a boat anchor. “Cutthroat” is a type of fish and a colloquial expression of severity—a cutthroat game of chess, for instance. It is also a method of killing. The speaker’s selves’ transit between this punning, between animacy and in- animacy: “rising” to “not / Moving” to “bound.”
The italicized couplet interrupts the flow of fish imagery, transforming the image about death from fish to worn-out fabric. According to Brock-Broido, these italicized lines are interpolations of Dickinson’s own correspondences. The velvet coat is an even more explicit image of inanimacy— like the fish, it is rendered as an object of human use, similar to the lambs in “Carrowmore,” but unlike either the fish or the lambs, the velvet coat never had a history of animal life before becoming an object of service to humans.
—& if you die of air as Well
The stream will sew itself shut—my lodengreen gills
Will be rouged past Recognition in a vein of metal ore.
A return to aquatic imagery. The midpoint of the couplet signals a POV shift from the “I” to a “you” with the very Dickinson conjunction “—&” ; Esther Whewell has described the ampersand in Brock-Broido’s work as “an icon for the twisted body” (2021, 165). Here it seems the em dash/ampersand twist the flow of time and singular perspective, focusing on an imagined future loss of a third figure —the you.
The third figure makes regular appearances in Brock-Broido’s poetry. I first observed this in another essay on Brock-Broido’s Master Letters. The third figure is present in “Carrowmore”—the I, the sheep, the burnt other—as well as in “Moving On in the Dark…,” characteristically ambiguous, perhaps the speaker’s father, mentioned in the first two couplets of the poem or perhaps the “Master” to which all the poems in this collection address, who is himself an amalgamation of shifting identities, described by Brock-Broido as “the fractured countenance of a composite portrait, police artist sketch” (1995, viii). Identifying the third figure, however, is less important than registering the fraught intensity the speaker feels for it. In this case, the death of the “you” is connected to the speaker’s injury: “gills / … rouged past Recognition.”
The death of the you leads to greater devastation for the speaker. Similar to the lambs in “Carrowmore” bad things happen to the speaker as a result of loss. The speaker shows little agency to alter the course of her destiny. Her passivity bears out especially in the next couplets:
When the boat leaves the lake stacked with odd
Amphibians tinned in salt, the metalled lids
Will glint like zippers, marlin,
Stars.
Rather than the lambs “born…//…to end” or the cremains of the “burnt other / Who went first,” the speaker identifies with fish packed and preserved for human consumption. Whereas earlier the speaker puns on individual fish, here, her focus is on their containers, which resemble the luminescence of the animals they contain; the beauty and self-identification with containment speaks to the logics of the eating disorder and girlhood more generally, keep the body as small and perfect as possible. This even extends to the poem’s couplet form, a form often employed in The Master Letters.
In Carole Maso’s 1995 interview, Brock-Broido describes her relationship to the couplet form as “my great addiction….Every stanza has an absolute beginning and an absolute end. And no middle.” It is difficult not to read this statement as being about the physical body as well as the couplet form. Brock-Broido is drawn to extremes in content, whether that be meticulously packed fish, lambs “born…to end,” or in form, whether bodily or poetic. It seems that the couplet’s tensile strength is what supports the ambiguity and fragmentation among the poems’ figures. The couplet is a cage for shifting forms and the subdivision of self:
In this half-lured life all
Night long I will listen for you, loaded
Like an ark, Boundless, Void
Of course—moving On.
How long how on how oft how long.
The beginning and end of the poem are, structurally-speaking, mirror images. Here the heavily enjambed and subordinated sentence precedes a final end-stopped line. The beginning and end contrast in terms of the activity: whereas before she crosses her father’s gate, here, the speaker listens for the you. The poem begins with action and ends with stillness, with more unidentified Dickinson lines in the speaker’s mouth, asking questions that go unanswered, conveying the spiritual hunger characteristic of both Dickinson’s and Brock-Broido’s Master Letters.
